(Disclaimer: yes, I bought a $180 4TB Crucial SSD too, but my family split the cost with me since they’re going to use my Jellyfin server. Whether that counts towards the final cost is up to you. And the electricity cost is pretty negligible to run a Le Potato as a server, but I guess you can count that too.)
So this all started rather innocently. I was fed up with all the ads being shoved in my face with everything I do, so I finally decided that it was time to set up a Pi-hole on a single board computer. For me, it ended up being a Le Potato. I had never even touched Linux prior to this, so it took me a day or so to get everything set up. I love learning new things so I kind of got hooked on learning my way around Linux basics and decided that I was going to upgrade my setup to a Pi-hole + VPN using wireguard. That was kind of a beast to configure as a novice but I got that to work after about a week. Now I was getting ad free content anywhere I wanted on my phone. I rode that high for a few weeks until I realized that I was just scratching the surface of what I could do with my little $30 Linux server setup and this is where I really got to upgrade.
I had learned of Jellyfin from LTT and decided that I was going to test it out. I set up the Jellyfin server on the Le Potato and I was off to the races. Now I just needed content. I read through some of the wiki and settled on Mullvad+qbittorrent to find the content I wanted. With everything configured it still didn’t really feel complete, so I set up profiles for my family members and gave them their own passwords to access the content. I quickly realized that 64 GB was not nearly enough (without a rolling library) and I was getting annoyed with having to constantly swith the flash drive I was using between the Le Potato and the laptop where I was downloading my content. So I went out and bought a 4TB USB SSD from Crucial and set up access as a NAS on Ubuntu with Samba.
It’s just now finally set up. My family texts me to let me know what it is they’re wanting to watch, I torrent it, upload it to my NAS, and Jellyfin streams that content to my family 100% free. I’ve turned my 6 family members into pirates and they barely even realize it.
Well, $180 at Best Buy for a 4TB Crucial SSD. My family is splitting the cost with me though, so really it’s like $30.
I know you’re just busting my balls, but some people will unironically bring that up as a point of contention. If I really wanted to, I could have just kept using the 64 GB flash drive I had laying around and just had a rotating library, but then it would limit how much time my family would have to watch shows before I had to roll them out for something else. And I didn’t like that personally.